Mahler 2 is the second album from Philharmonia Records, following their first album - Santtu conducts Strauss.

As if he had become one with Wilhelm Müller’s hero, Schubert explores solitude, emotional turmoil, the lure of new horizons, disappointed or impossible love – and death too. In this first instalment of the Schubert series that Samuel Hasselhorn and Ammiel Bushakevitz will be offering us every year at 200-year intervals from the composition of the songs in their programme, they give a poetic and poignant reading of this founding masterpiece of the lied.

Composer and novelist, Anthony Burgess, was a unique creative artist whose dual mastery of music and literature resulted in a career strewn with an output of remarkable diversity. Burgess came into contact with the Aighetta Guitar Quartet while living in Monte Carlo in 1986, and the sublime arrangements and original works in this recording were all composed for this ensemble. The three guitar quartets range from the well-crafted First Quartet intended as a homage to Ravel, while the Second and Third Quartets explore virtuoso technique alongside adventurous and at times haunting harmonies and polytonality.

Jeff Lorber's funkiest album yet, featuring an amazing allstar lineup including Grammy winning jazz greats Jimmy Haslip, Paul Jackson, Jr, Snarky Puppy's Marc Lettieri, Gary Novak, David Mann and more! Grammy winning superstar keyboardist, writer, producer Jeff Lorber is renowned as a pioneer in the Jazz-Fusion movement. Scoring #1 radio hits with Jeff Lorber Fusion and as afounding member of Smooth Jazz super-group Jazz Funk Soul, Lorber performs constantly before his dedicated fans from coast to coast!! Highlights include the uber-funky "The Drop," the warm, intimate "Hang Tight," the bright, uplifting "Reception," and more Lorber originals.

The Cello Concerto no.1 was Villa-Lobos’s first major orchestral work. Filled with youthful energy and displaying an eclectic style, it is the sound of the composer finding his voice. Three decades later and with his reputation at its height, the inspired melodies and flowing style of the Fantasia sees Villa-Lobos giving free rein to his vivid imagination. Composed for the Brazilian cellist Aldo Parisot, the no less inventive and lushly scored Cello Concerto no.2 from 1953 suggests man’s solitude when facing the vastness of nature.

The music of Spanish-Argentine composer Eduardo Grau is imbued with Hispanic elements. His Concerto of ‘Yuste’ for Violin, Piano and Timpani was inspired by the Spanish monastery of its title and is notable for its rhythmic drive, lyricism and mystical atmosphere. The Concertino for Viola and Piano is deeply expressive and intimate, while folkloric dances from Argentina are used in the Concerto for Clarinet including the vivacious chacarera. The verses of Spanish Golden Age poet Garcilaso de la Vega provided the inspiration for Grau’s To the Flower of Gnido for Flute and Piano.

Conductor Paul Gameson directs Ex Corde Vocal Ensemble in this album of music by composer David Lancaster. These works draw upon the legacies of artists and craftsmen who lived and worked in England’s medieval York, leaving evidence of their beliefs, stories and ideas which have survived into the present, in carved stone and painted glass.

Since 1822 the Royal Academy of Music has inspired generations of musicians to connect, collaborate and create. This recording of Bach Partitas continues this mission, reuniting renowned harpsichordist and conductor Trevor Pinnock with students from the Royal Academy of Music and The Glenn Gould School of The Royal Conservatory in Toronto. Following the success of Goldberg Variations (arr. for small orchestra by Józef Koffler), the Principal of the Academy, Jonathan Freeman-Attwood commissioned ‘re-imaginings’ of three of Bach’s most celebrated keyboard Partitas for the same scoring, by alumnus composer Thomas Oehler. The creative challenge – to bring a fresh perspective to some of Bach’s most elegant resourceful and refined keyboard writing – pays off in the hands of wonderfully talented musicians, and reveals how Oehler’s faithful response to Bach’s score allows the music to glow as brightly as ever.

The Divertimento in E♭ major, K. 563, is a string trio, written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1788, the year in which he completed his last three symphonies (nos. 39–41) and his "Coronation" Piano Concerto. It is his last divertimento and different from his other divertimenti not only in its instrumentation but also in its compositorial ambition and scope.

This is a remastering of a concert given by the Gerhard Quartet at the Fundacion Juan March on 6 June 2023. It features the world premiere recordings of String Quartets Nos. 6 and 7bis by Conrado del Campo (1878-1953), one of the most original but least well-known Spanish composers of the first half of the twentieth century. The concert was part of the Proyecto Conrado, whose remit involves progamming the first complete cycle of his thirteen string quartets; producing a complete edition of the scores, most of which have never been published; and releasing recordings of the quartets (in various formats). The aim of this ambitious initiative is to rescue a significant body of of works from the undeserved neglect into which they have fallen.

In 1958 Poulenc composed La voix humaine, a one-act opera for soprano and orchestra, based on the monodrama of the same name, written for the Comédie-Française by his friend Jean Cocteau. In this staging of the end of an amorous relationship, we hear only the woman’s side of a final telephone conversation with the man who has abandoned her. The orchestra in this innovative work is used not only to unify the composition, but also to reveal what the voice, laid bare by a moving parlé-chanté style, does not say. Fiançailles pour rire and Chemins de l’amour, usually for voice and piano, but presented here in an orchestrated version by one of our finest conductors, Frédéric Chaslin, completes this eloquent rendition of works of a bittersweetness that Poulenc transcends like no other.